A garage is an obvious place to give a dog room of its own. It is already separate from the house, it has its own door to the outside, and there is no carpet to ruin. What it is not, in the condition most garages are in, is a surface a dog can actually live on.
Below is what has to change, in the order that matters, starting with a sealed epoxy garage floor, and a job we did for a St. Louis family with two dogs where every one of these came up.
What dogs actually do to a garage
- Drywall tears. It has a paper face, and the damage is almost always in the bottom three to four feet, where a dog can reach standing or jumping.
- Bare concrete holds odor. A slab is porous, so anything spilled soaks into it rather than sitting on top. That is the smell people blame on the dog.
- Utilities sit at nose height. An open electrical or systems panel on a garage wall is at exactly the wrong height.
- Temperature swings. An uninsulated St. Louis garage passes 90 degrees on a summer afternoon and drops below freezing in January.
Protect the lower walls first
Cover the part the dog can reach and the rest of the wall stops being a problem. On this job we mounted stainless steel treadplate panels to the lower portion of the walls, with fresh sheetrock and a coat of paint above them. Treadplate cannot be scratched through and it wipes clean, which is the whole point of using metal rather than a tougher paint.
The old cabinets and the damaged drywall came out first. Garage Designs handles insulation, drywall and paint as part of a full garage remodel two to three times a month, and the drywall stage on its own usually takes at least a week. Drywall is not sold here as a standalone job, it is quoted inside a full remodel.
The floor is what decides whether the space smells
Sealing the slab is the single change that does the most for a garage a dog lives in. A polyaspartic or epoxy coating closes the surface so liquid sits on top and can be wiped or hosed off instead of soaking in. On this job the coating went over discolored concrete and covered it completely.
The coating is installed over concrete that has been mechanically ground first, not just washed. If a slab has already absorbed a lot, that grinding removes the top layer along with a good deal of what is in it.
Two questions dog owners ask about these floors, answered in about a minute each:
Finishes, grip and the full process are on the epoxy garage floor page.
Build the kennel into the cabinets
This is the part that separates a garage with a dog in it from a garage built for a dog. Rather than standing two crates in the middle of the floor, the custom cherry finish cabinets along the back wall were made with cutout space for the family two kennels. The crates sit inside the run, the traffic path stays clear, and the storage above them is still usable.
Sizes, finishes and how the runs are laid out are on the custom garage cabinets page.
Get the utilities out of reach
Lighting and electrical is roughly a once a month job for us, almost always inside a larger remodel, because a garage being turned into a room needs more outlets and better light than the original build provided.
Temperature matters more here than in a storage garage
A bay used for parking can swing with the weather. A space a dog spends hours in cannot. An uninsulated garage door is usually the largest uninsulated surface in a garage, and many builder grade doors are a single skin of steel, so insulating the walls and ceiling while leaving the door bare moves the problem rather than solving it.
A ductless mini split heats and cools from a single wall mounted head and needs no ductwork. We install these once or twice a year, which is a small number and worth saying plainly: most people start with insulation and a radiant heater. There is more detail in adding heat to a garage.
Keep the storage, or the garage takes the room back
The leashes, towels, food bins and everything else that was on the floor needs somewhere to go, or within a year it is back on the floor. On this job StoreWALL slat wall panels in Rustic Cedar went up to carry it, so the wall does the holding instead of the floor.
Panel options and what hangs on them are on the slatwall storage page.
A St. Louis garage built for two dogs
Everything above came from one job. The family had two dogs, Shadow and Lucky, and a garage the dogs had already damaged. We tore out the old cabinets and the ruined drywall, hung fresh sheetrock and painted, mounted stainless treadplate along the lower walls, coated the floor, built the cherry cabinet run with the two kennel openings, hid the utility panel behind doors, and put up the Rustic Cedar slat wall.
Common questions about dog friendly garages
Talk to someone who has built one
Garage Designs of St. Louis has been remodeling garages since 2002. Brandon Coleman joined in 2014 installing epoxy floors, moved into full remodels in 2021, and bought the company in May 2023. He learned the work here before he owned it.
The shop is at 772 Merus Ct., Fenton, MO 63026, and the office is open Monday through Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM. Call 314-308-7780, or request a free estimate and someone will come out and look at the space.
A dog room is one of several things a garage can become. The full range is on our garage remodeling page.
